In her new book, CUBA: What Everyone Needs to Know, CFR Senior Fellow and Director for Latin America StudiesJulia E. Sweig provides a straightforward guide to Cuba’s politics, its often fraught relationship with the United States, and its shifting role in the global community. Award-winning author Sweig has toured the island’s prisons, lived with Cuban families following the collapse of the Soviet Union, conducted research in government archives, and interviewed hundreds of Cubans over the last two decades.

Julia E. Sweig is the Nelson and David Rockefeller Senior Fellow for Latin America Studies and Director for Latin America Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. She is the author of Inside the Cuban Revolution (winner of the AHA Herbert Feis award for the best book of the year by an independent scholar) and Friendly Fire: Losing Friends and Making Enemies in the Anti-American Century.

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher dedicated to being a resource for its members, government officials, business executives, journalists, educators and students, civic and religious leaders, and other interested citizens in order to help them better understand the world and the foreign policy choices facing the United States and other countries.

Miguel Diaz-Canel, set to replace Raul Castro as president of Cuba after sixty years of Castro rule, will be faced with the challenges of implementing economic reform and sidestepping regional isolation.